Taxes fail---other countries thump.

Many discussions of U.S. regulations seem to presume that American laws can restrict or prevent AI development. However, this is demonstrably not the case. While the U.S. has led the world in the development of key computing technologies and several of the world’s largest software companies[30]—Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, Apple and Adobe—are American firms, the U.S. is not the only place where AI is being developed. Russian president Vladimir Putin has heralded AI as “the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind.”[31] In September 2017, he went as far as to tell Russian students that the nation that “becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”[32]

With Russia and other nations embracing AI,[33] nations that don’t innovate in AI technologies—or worse, those that actually restrict its development—run the risk of falling behind and not being able to compete with the countries that promote AI development.[34] Advanced AIs can create advantages for a nation’s businesses and its defense. Nations without AI or with less mature AI systems might be placed at a severe disadvantage and forced to buy systems with whatever capabilities the more advanced nations are willing to let their firms sell to other countries. While the state of nations after the introduction of AI is inherently unclear, one thing is apparent: restricting AI development in the U.S. won’t stop it from being developed. In fact, this may make it far more likely that the eventual winning AI systems won’t respect our societal values, because they have been developed by another country or group that doesn’t share them.